SuperX is a Linux-based distribution that does not like to advertise its
Linux roots. Hence, the official website, which only speaks about the ultimate computer operating system and
superior alternative solutions. Moreover, it boasts an enterprise like approach, with heavy emphasis on
support. Somewhat slightly intrigued, and bolstered by a warm recommendation by a friend, I gave it a chance.

We will be doing the review on my usual test guinea pig laptop, a T61 with
Intel graphics and two internal SSD. The machine already hosts three other, usual players, and we will remove
the fourth instance, in favor of SuperX 2.0 Darwin. Now, as you may notice, I have not yet mentioned who the
papa of this distro is, but as you have guessed right, it's Ubuntu. Let's explore.

Live session and suchlike

Darwin boots with a rather elaborate music note, splashing your screen with the installation window right away,
where you are asked to accept a license agreement and proceed, decline, or postpone the installation for later.
This is somewhat counterintuitive, as you would expect a user to get a chance to try the live session first,
hence the name live session.

If you close the installer window, which happens to be fully maximized, and you can't yet really see your
desktop, then you will find yourself logged into a classic, very pleasant, blue-and-silver dominated KDE
session.

Wireless connectivity & Samba sharing

Wireless worked fine, but you get that bug, where the connection supposedly fails before you can authenticate
against the access point. KDEWallet did not pester me. Samba sharing was available, but it was rather slow, for
some reason.

Look & feel

Darwin is a decent beast, altogether, but I did find a number of annoying visual glitches that kind of spoiled
it for me. The system menu is a very interesting element. It shows all the icons as one big dash, but it is
transparent, and you can see the desktop wallpaper as well as the desktop items peeking through, creating a
colorful confusion. In the left top corner, you can see a bunch of icons fighting one another for dominance.

I could not find a way to customize this. This feels somewhat like Dash in Unity thingie. Then, you have
horizontally tabbed items, including Misc and Power, with the last allowing you to turn your box off, reboot
and alike, however the arrangement did not quite do it for me, for some reason. Then, back to the desktop
underneath, for example, the installation icon breaks the distro version number over two lines. Ugly. This
really upsets the OCD demons in me. Lastly, after you've done using a program, a pale outline will remain
around the most recent icon, and you really can't get rid of it, even if you refresh your desktop.

Multimedia

Flash and MP3 worked fine, although Chromium complained it was not the default browser, which would make its
placement as the desktop icon dubious. VLC was also smart enough to download and display music art.

Installation

A typical KDE, and then - not. It wasn't the splendid experience that I expected, mostly because of an attempt
to blend something quite SUSE with something quite Ubuntu. The installer
launched in full mode and hid the bottom panel. However, you can alt+tab your way out back to the desktop, to
learn the system has disabled desktop effects, and it would do this every time you switch back. So it is not
the most pleasant transition. Furthermore, subsequent switches to the installer window would background it
rather than foreground it, so you end up with an overall inconsistent presentation layer during the entire
process.

After that, it's a very standard installation thingie, just like Kubuntu,
really. You get a nice slideshow, which even tells us that hardcore gamers might want Steam. In the quiet words
of one Turkish, I fail to see a correlation between hardcore gamers and Steam. Did you get that? Yes, before ze
Germans come. Indeed.

However, there was one big issue during the installation. At some point, I started smelling burnt plastic and
metal. I assumed the laptop might be close to dying, and true, it was blistering hot when touched. Honestly.
Friggin' hot. I do not ever recall any other distro imposing so much heat on this quite generic box. It was
rather astonishing. Luckily, the laptop survived the ordeal.

Use it, don't lose it

Time to see how SuperX 2.0 Darwin behaveth after being installed alongside friends and family in a nice
quad-boot setup. There were no problems with the GRUB2 configuration and such like.
The desktop remains as it was, blue and silver and nice.

Applications

SuperX sports an interesting assortment of programs. Somewhat weird, though. You get Firefox, Chromium,
Thunderbird, LibreOffice, VLC as the default set. You also get Kamerka, KTorrent, KolourPaint, and some other
programs. The big issue is, they have different names, compared to what you see in the system menu, so this can
be confusing. And there's Blender too, which makes me wonder why. How many people
would really use it.

Package management

The usual, familiar stuff, except for a rebranded name. Now, remember how that slideshow promised Steam? Well,
Steam is nowhere to be had. So something is fishy here, and
it's called, a herring!

Desktop effects

Worked just fine, as you'd expect.

System resources

Here's the big deal. As you recall, Darwin almost melted the box while installing. Even during normal use, it
was quite hot and noisy, with the fans spinning like mad. The responsiveness was moderate, not as sharp as you
might want. However, I was quite surprised by the memory usage, as well as CPU activity. The system was always
doing something in the background, and it would take 700MB RAM on a machine with just Intel graphics. This is
easily 50-60% more than most other distros, if not double. Even my Kubuntu instance on a much more powerful
machine, and with Nvidia graphics takes less than that, by approx.
100MB. Mint with Cinnamon easily takes half this much
memory.

Problemski

There were a bunch of other issues that cropped up during the testing. In addition to all of those other
listed, here's a brief summary of some other glitches and niggles that annoyed me. For one, the apps would take
a long while loading. Two, notice that Chromium remains as the desktop icon of choice, even though Firefox is
the default application. Then, it sports both a Google icon and a misleading name, Google Chromium. That ain't
so.

Another thing that bothered me was the sort of MOTD in the konsole windows. Every time you launch a terminal
window, switch to another user, including root, and alike, you get the splash telling you what distro you're
using, taking half your terminal screen. Thank you, we get it. Then, on default width, one of the lines is
broken over to the next, so it does not look quite as appealing as one might expect.

The search functionality is also flawed. Search for Print or Printer anywhere in the system menu, and you won't
find it. You will have to fire up a special Control Center to find the content you want, and this goes against
the standard KDE conventions.

Conclusion

SuperX 2.0 Darwin is a curious and somewhat disappointing project, especially since it places the bar so high
from the start. However, having a word premium written somewhere on a website does not translate into having a
premium product. A typical distro, with the word Linux stripped, some rebranding, a few semi-unique apps, all
based on Ubuntu, and you have a new operating system. Methinks not. Forking and spinning is just fine, but
there must be an added value to the new idea.

Darwin had some nice qualities and decent behavior and functionality out of the box, but almost as always as
with any uniquely forked distro, it introduces more problems that it tries to resolve. You get Flash and MP3
and some new programs. OK. So what. You get slow Samba performance, weird naming and a system menu that does
not search properly, no Steam as promised, and almost awful system performance, with excessive heat due to CPU
activity, plus ravenous memory usage. On top of all this, there's nothing that would truly constitute as a
premium or maybe enterprise product. No special applications that cater to businesses or professional users, no
feel you're about to embark on a lovely office adventure.

Anyhow, SuperX 2.0 Darwin is an interesting concept, but it fails short of its mark. It surely does not possess
the premium qualities that it tries to offer to the user, and the QA could benefit from a lot of extra work.
Networking and system resources are the weakest points, and I wonder how they got borked. Overall, 6/10, and
surely not something to take your breath away.